


Even the Hapless Puppets of Eldritch Beings From Beyond Space and Time Deserve a Little Love!

by Aesoleucian



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, I mean people still get murdered by avatars but it's relatively nice, M/M, au where things are relatively nice, daedalus roommates au?!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 02:43:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18907900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: Jan has too much to deal with. One of his flatmates is invisible and the other wears sunglasses at night. Somehow seeing stars during astronomy club became a bad thing. Everywhere he looks there's another sinister plot, and he doesn't understand a single thing that's going on. He's honestly just trying to culture cells, does it have to be this dramatic?





	Even the Hapless Puppets of Eldritch Beings From Beyond Space and Time Deserve a Little Love!

It’s about two months into the lease that Jan finally asks Manuela. “Have you ever _seen_ , er… sorry, I don’t remember his name? It was your ad he answered.”

She seems to ignore him for a moment, still looking at her laptop screen, but then she says, “Yeah, I searched it in my email. Carter Chilcott. And no, I haven’t seen him. He got the tour separately.”

“And you don’t have a key to his room or anything? I’ve tried knocking but he won’t answer.”

“Maybe he’s a ghost,” says Manuela distractedly.

It’s useless talking to her when she’s like this, so he makes some tea. This requires using his phone screen as a torch because she gets extremely cross when she comes into contact with what she terms ‘unnecessary photons.’ So the apartment has blackout curtains and it’s stifling but at least he’s allowed to open them at night. If he were to redo his apartment hunt, he would keep looking. There are plenty of units with roof access that he _wouldn’t_ have to share with Manuela Dominguez and a possibly dead third flatmate whose name he has just now learned.

Not that Jan believes in ghosts.

His phone buzzes with a text message and he looks around at Manuela to see if she’s annoyed—he can’t actually see her, but sometimes she’s _very_ insistent about quiet. She hasn’t noticed this time. It’s from the astronomy club group chat: there’s going to be a meeting Saturday night. _I’ll definitely be there if someone can pick me up!_ he replies. Harriet is pretty much always good to pick him up, which is right nice of her, but he hasn’t been in the club long enough to feel comfortable asking her directly. She offers anyway, and it’s settled.

On Saturday around sunset she turns up in her extremely nice car, and he hurriedly bundles himself and his telescope into it. Mike is already in the back seat, wrapped in so much scarf Jan can only see his eyes. Mike does a minimum-effort wave and goes back to looking out the window.

It’s a bit of a drive out to a part of the countryside where they _can’t_ see the light pollution from London, but Jan is enjoying watching the dark shapes of hills and trees go past, silhouetted against the dusting of stars. They stop by a large field where two other cars are already parked; Lisette, Simon, and Niall are setting up their telescopes.

One reason Jan likes astronomy club is because it’s so quiet. They aren’t here for any kind of exciting event like a meteor shower, just to gaze into deep space and occasionally share an interesting star cluster. Sometimes Harriet delivers these bizarre poetic speeches that sound sort of like some kind of meditative guide, which is an _experience_ all of its own, and Jan isn’t sure whether he likes it. It is cool to get into that trance state where he feels like he can see to the end of the observable universe, but he always comes out of it strangely shaken. And it’s tough to get back into a car afterward. But Harriet doesn’t tell him off for opening the window while they’re on the highway and closing his eyes so he can pretend the car is in freefall.

Tonight, when he opens his eyes again, it _is_.

It’s as if the sky has been reflected so it’s below them too: just the myriad stars and, for some reason, breathable atmosphere buffetting in through the windows. He looks down, a little dizzy, and he can see that the constellations below them _are_ the one’s he’ll expect in about six months. Virgo and Corvus stand out because he knows them well.

“Harriet,” he says over the noise of the wind. She doesn’t reply, that he can hear, so he looks over at the driver’s side. It’s empty. When he twists around, Mike is gone from the back seat too. Only the telescopes are lying across it.

Ah. So. He’s going to fall into the void of the sky forever, is he? Well, he may as well enjoy it. He undoes his seatbelt and starts to squirm out of the window so he’s sitting on the sill. That’s when a hand clamps onto his ankle and he jumps so hard he very nearly falls out of the car. The hand drags him back in and, ruffled by the wind, he finds Mike looking at him reproachfully from the back seat.

“You can’t jump out of a moving car.”

Jan blinks at him. “Did you just see—no, sorry, never mind.”

The next month when the astronomy club meets again, Niall is missing. He hasn’t been in the group chat either since last month. When Jan asks if anyone knows where he is, Simon shakes his head, smiling, and says, “Some people can’t handle the sky as it is.”

Jan seems to be one of them, because on the way back he hallucinates the same endless sky in all directions. Only something is different, this time. He can’t put his finger on it for a long time as he searches the stars, but then, finally, he realizes. Some of them have moved. The Pleiades have split down the middle, and there are new stars visible where they used to go together.

He’s broken out of it when Mike claps a hand on his shoulder and tells him, “Take it slow, mate.”

Astronomy club is _doing_ something to him. It must be the staring into the void all the time. It’s given him too much perspective. But every month on the drive home he finds the car floating empty in space. And every month the stars move a little more. Not all of them, just certain ones in certain areas of the sky. He’s started mapping the way they change from month to month. He asks Harriet if she’s seeing this too, but she just gives him an odd look. On clear nights when the club doesn’t meet he keeps mapping, and yes, they change slowly throughout the month, not just on club nights.

When he flips through all the maps from six months in sequence, he gasps out loud in fear, or awe. Because what has come clear is a vast star-studded hand moving slowly across the sky, as of a being so huge and so impossibly far away that it seems to move in slow motion.

He asks one of his coworkers who you’re supposed to talk to if you’ve seen something that can’t possibly be true, but you have evidence. “Dunno,” she says. “Like, something paranormal? Maybe the Magnus Institute, they do hauntings and stuff like that.”

It seems like his best bet, so he goes in at the first opportunity. The Magnus Institute, when he looked it up, didn’t have the most shining reputation, but it is quite professional-looking inside. He’s greeted at the front by a woman who asks if he wants to make a statement, and then he waits in a comfortable chair until another woman comes out to show him to the recording room. There is yet another woman, this one old and severe, and he vaguely wonders whether any men work here.

“I am the head archivist, Gertrude Robinson,” she says, holding out her hand for him to shake.

“Jan Kilbride. Er, thanks for having me today. You want me to just… tell you…?”

“Statement of Jan Kilbride, given March twelfth, 2011, regarding…?”

“A, um, the stars are moving.”

“…Regarding the movement of the stars. Begin when you’re ready.”

And so he tells her and her recorder. It flows out of him easily, poetically, the way Harriet might have told it if she’d actually noticed. All the while Robinson looks past him as if she’s concentrating very hard on his words. “So, that can’t possibly be real, obviously, because someone would have noticed. There’s people whose _job_ it is to just look at the stars all the time. But I’ve never heard of a hallucination that’s this—stable, like I’ve been keeping records, independent every time. Look, I’ve scanned them into my laptop. What do you make of that?”

She’s silent for a moment, flipping through the pictures forward and then back again. Then she says, “You don’t find it frightening?”

“Well, yeah, existentially, if you think about it for a minute, it’s _terrifying_. But it’s also so beautiful.”

“Hm. I can investigate, but since nobody else claims to have seen this, I don’t know that I can do much. Do you give permission to keep your contact information on file?”

“Yeah, yes, um, just call me if you _do_ find anything?”

“We will.”

He wanders off, feeling vaguely fulfilled and vaguely unfulfilled, and gets lost in the basement of the Magnus Institute. He peers into a door and finds a small kitchen where the woman who let him in and a few others are having tea.

“You can come in if you like,” she says. “There’s plenty of tea. Sometimes giving a statement really takes it out of people.”

Jan sits down in the empty chair between two of the men she’s with. One is broad-chested and handsome, wearing a yellow polo shirt, and the other looks like he may actually be homeless. The handsome one pours him a cup of tea and pushes the plate of biscuits toward him. “I’m Tim,” he says. “Just an assistant researcher and archivist. We all are, here, except David.”

Jan glances at the homeless man, who is very determinedly deconstructing a biscuit, and who gives him an awkward smile. “Er, what do you do?” Jan asks him.

“Nothing much,” he mumbles. “I try to keep my head down.”

To cover his confusion, Jan takes a drink of tea.

“So, what happened to you?” asks the woman. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m Sasha, by the way.”

“Jan. Um, well, I’ve been recording the stars moving.”

“Ooh, are you an astronomer?”

“No, no, it’s only a hobby. I actually work in a cell pathology lab.”

“Oh!” says Sasha. “Do you think you could give us advice on something? We’ve not been able to find any actual pathologists to ask about this, and it’s sort of important to the statement. I’m sorry to cut you off, but we have been wondering about this for a while.”

This is how Jan gets embroiled in explaining the evolution and transmission of diseases to three researcher-archivists and a homeless man (who doesn’t seem to care much either way). Tim does a dramatic reading of the statement in question, which frankly sounds like the type of batshit Jan expects in a lab running a project that sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. No, he doesn’t ‘believe in the paranormal,’ but, well, there are some things no-one can explain yet, and he knows they happen.

He ends up leaving the assistants his phone number in case any more consulting is needed. He doesn’t really mind the idea of doing it for free, because they’re interesting people to talk to. Still doesn’t know what the deal is with David, though; when Tim was showing him the way out of the building he asked in a whisper, and Tim replied,

“He just kind of showed up one day like a lost cat wandering into the building. Said the last time he remembered being in London was two years from now. We’ve been trying to keep him away from Gertrude so he doesn’t have to give a statement. And we feed him.”

“Not only biscuits, I hope.”

“No, sometimes we have in snack cakes.”

 

Jan doesn’t know what he expected, that David lives permanently in the Institute? Certainly he wasn’t expecting to see the man outside his building, glancing repeatedly and nervously at absolutely nothing.

“Hello, David,” he says, because even if David seems busy hallucinating it’s not like Jan never does, and it’s only polite.

The man starts and looks around. “Er, sorry, yes, I, I suppose I do. Hello, Jan. I didn’t know Ca—oh.”

“What?”

David looks away diffidently, toward whatever he’s been staring at. “You don’t mind? I don’t want to be any bother. If it’s inconvenient for you. No? Erm, yes, I was just, talking to Carter. Your flatmate.”

Jan stares. David shrugs and becomes smaller. There’s no real way he could possibly know that Jan’s mysterious missing flatmate is named Carter unless he’s spoken to either Manuela or the man himself. “So, er, do you know why he’s invisible?”

“Why _are_ you invisible?” David looks toward the place where Carter apparently is, and seems to listen. “He says he went to a dodgy networking event. And then he started to disappear.”

“That sucks,” says Jan, because he can’t think of anything else.

“There are worse things than not being seen,” David mumbles, as if to himself. Then, aloud, “Well, I ought to be going. Lots to do.” And he scurries off down the street, leaving Jan (presumably) alone with an invisible Carter Chilcott. Jan smiles awkwardly at the place where he might be, and goes inside. No point holding the door for him, because Jan wouldn’t know when he’s gone in anyway.

Two days later when he’s looking through his phone contacts for one of the grad students in his lab, he finds a number entered for Carter Chilcott. Huh. He texts to it: _Can you tell me what happened? At the networking event?_

In 160-character installments, he gets the following story.

Carter had just finished defending his master’s thesis, which was on novel techniques for meteorological simulation, and he was shopping around for a job that wouldn’t require him to stay at King’s for a PhD. There were plenty of companies that were willing to hire him, but he wanted the best job. Which in his case meant a job that paid absurdly well and allowed him to work from home: simulating ocean currents for a shipping company. At first he was happy to be working from home, because it meant his schedule was so much more open. Then he realized that he didn’t really have much to do with his free time. He’d answered Manuela’s ad because he thought it would be nice to live with other people, so he could at least get _some_ human contact on days when he didn’t leave the house. As Jan can tell, that didn’t work out as planned.

Just before he was supposed to move in, his boss threw a company party. Carter was sort of excited to meet the other people who worked for Solus, but it was a _horrible_ party. Maybe only for him, because Carter got the feeling that everyone else there knew each other and knew what they were doing. Like he was the only employee who wasn’t allowed in the office. He stood by the canapés all night, feeling smaller with every person who asked him what department he was in, they hadn’t seen him before, until he wished he could vanish.

The next day he found he _had_ vanished. Nobody could see him. He was utterly alone in every crowd. But he was still signed onto a lease for a third of the rent in a fourth-floor apartment in Watford, so he moved in. He never saw his roommates. Both of their doors seemed to be locked all the time, but new groceries turned up in the pantry, so he knew they must be there. In fact, aside from the awful company parties he sometimes went to, the only person in the city who seemed to be able to see him was a man he sometimes saw wandering the streets without any obvious purpose. So they talked occasionally. The man, David, seemed sympathetic. He’d spent a great deal of time unseen and unknown, but he didn’t know how it could be fixed except by dumb luck. One day the city had just spat him out and he’d found himself here, where people were sometimes kind and where he was beginning to wonder whether no cruelty was coming after all. It wasn’t helpful to Carter, but he was still desperate to talk to David, to _anyone_.

Next is a flood of questions: what’s Jan’s name? What does he do? Where did he meet David? Jan does his best to answer, and ends up pointing Carter to the Magnus Institute to maybe make a written statement, seeing as he doesn’t know anywhere else that might take this kind of thing seriously.

Carter says he’ll go on Monday. Monday night, Jan asks how it went. It takes until Wednesday for Carter to reply: _I think they got my statement. Maybe. You’ll know if you get a phone call, because I put you as my reference._

 _Great!_ Jan replies. _Looking forward to it._

On Thursday Carter texts him, _Was that okay? I should have asked permission, I guess. Let me know._

Jan replies, _It was fine. They haven’t called me yet, though._

On Friday Carter asks, _Are you angry at me? Please understand, I’d rather you yelled at me. Absolutely anything is better than the silent treatment._

Jan replies immediately, typing so fast his fingers trip over each other, _I’m not mad at you! Can yiu confirm you’re getting my texts?_

On Sunday Carter begs him: _Please talk to me, Jan. You’re all I have. I don’t think David can see me any more. He just ignores me when I try to talk to him._

Jan calls him, but it’s no surprise that _the call cannot be completed as dialed_. He leaves a note on Carter’s door, but he doesn’t get any sign that Carter has seen it.

“What is this about?” Manuela asks him Sunday night, holding up a piece of paper.

He peers at it in the darkness. “I don’t know. Does it say anything on it?”

“‘Text me if you get this. I don’t think you’ve been receiving my messages.’ It was on Carter’s door, and it’s in your handwriting.”

“Something’s happened to him. Happening to him. He didn’t just _become_ invisible, someone did it to him. And it’s getting worse, he can’t even get my texts any more.”

“Hm,” says Manuela. “Sounds like you shouldn’t piss off whoever he pissed off.” And she turns around and goes back into her own room.

 

On Thursday Tim from the Magnus Institute calls while Jan is making dinner, and he has to ask Manuela to take over so he won’t get distracted and burn something. He fully expects it to be full of chili pepper when he gets back, but that’s the price he pays to take phone calls while cooking.

“Hey, Jan. Turns out you’re a really interesting guy, huh? We’ve got a statement here from a guy claiming to be your flatmate.”

“Carter, yeah, I told him you guys might be able to help him.”

“Right, so we’re looking into it now. Could you confirm a few details?”

Jan does, and adds, “Since last week it’s gotten worse. I don’t think he’s been getting my text messages, or the notes I’ve left on his door. Manuela—our other flatmate—sort of implied that there was some kind of… revenge thing? Going on?”

“So, technically, we’re not allowed to investigate this. Because the Lukas family is one of our major funders. Look up our board of directors sometime. Off the record, this isn’t the first time they’ve been connected to a disappearance.”

Jan’s hand clenches into a fist in his shirt. “What you’re saying is, his boss did this to him and you’re not allowed to look for evidence under pain of funding cuts.”

“Yeah. I’m really sorry, Jan, but my hands are tied. I’ll just get fired if I try to make anything of it, and they’ll cover up the evidence. It’s not like I can sneak it into the morning edition.” He pauses, and Jan can faintly hear someone else talking in the background. “Uh, Jon does want me to tell you to come to us if there’s any more developments. He’s keeping a private file on this case because he’s kind of a kook. But I guess his paranoia’s justified _this_ time. So, yeah. Let us know if you hear anything else.”

“I will. Thank you.”

“Who was that?” asks Manuela when he returns. He reaches for the spoon but she’s holding it hostage. It looks suspiciously bright red around the edges.

“Magnus Institute calling about Carter. It’s a paranormal research institution—”

“Oh, I know the Magnus Institute,” says Manuela. He can’t see her very well, but her voice is dripping with far more malice than he feels is warranted. “Is Gertrude Robinson still head archivist there?”

“Yes…? Did she do something?”

“She persistently, and for no reason whatsoever, comments on my good friend’s work in public forums to try to discredit him. Her comments aren’t even salient, the only thing she can find to nitpick are his citations, because he’s a perfectly good historian and she knows it.” She thrusts the spoon toward him like a sword and stalks out of the kitchen. Quite honestly he’s not sure who to trust. He barely knows anything about Gertrude, but equally he’s found himself rather afraid of Manuela over the year they’ve been living together. Probably safest to stay out of it altogether, he thinks, and tastes the soup.

Yes, as expected, his entire mouth is on fire. Good Lord, he’s going to need a lot of sour cream for this one.

 

In the morning, he gets the impression that Manuela is still angry with him. Maybe partially because of the Robinson thing, but mainly because he forgot to close the curtains last night before going to bed. She’s like a dark, glowering cloud banging far more pots than necessary in the kitchen. He elects to skip breakfast and not pass her at all, by climbing out his window instead. _Yes_ , it’s a little overcomplicated to climb up to the roof and then hurry down the stairs before she can get ready to go, but he thinks anyone who’s met Manuela in a bad mood would find it justified.

He kind of likes the freedom of it, the idea that he has an extra, secret route to come and go as he wants to. And he can’t deny that clinging to the side of a building, four floors above the ground, is thrilling. He should be more afraid than he is, probably, but it wouldn’t be the worst way to go. He’d see the sky as he lay dying on the pavement below. It’s beautiful this morning, with little wisps of peachy cloud floating across it, and the sun just rising over the tops of the buildings.

Later in the day, around dinner time, he gets another text from Carter: _Are you there?_ Jan replies that yes, yes he is, but he gets no indication that went through either. So he picks up his telescope and gets into Harriet’s car and tries to put it out of his mind.

Tonight is one of the nights that Harriet does her meditative narration. He drifts in the sea of endless night that her voice conjures, watching the new constellations to see if he can slow down his mind enough to actually see them moving. Something is up there, or rather all around the Earth, something that could crush the planet and hardly notice. When Jan isn’t waking up in a cold sweat about it, it’s almost comforting. After all, it hasn’t killed them yet.

Tonight is different, though. As he’s craning out of the car window to mark how the bottom half of Cancer is moving, Harriet speaks over the buffetting noise of the wind.

“If you were waiting for your moment, this would be it.”

He looks round at her, bewildered. Her eyes are on where the road would be if they weren’t falling through space at what he can only describe as terminal velocity. One hand rests loosely on the wheel, so that he’s not sure whether she’s actually steering or not. “You wanted to go out there, didn’t you, the first time? Now’s your chance.”

“Mike was right, that it would be a bad idea to jump out of a moving car.”

She laughs. “What do you think would happen, you’d hit the road? There isn’t any. Just the sky.”

“I’m… hallucinating this. I’m hallucinating you talking to me.”

“Then hallucinate yourself out the window. What harm could it do if none of this is real?”

He glances into the back seat, where Mike is studiously avoiding looking up from his phone. So he’s not going to tell Jan it’s dangerous. Jan looks out the window again, and slowly his hands move to unbuckle his seatbelt. At least he can sit on the edge and look out over the roof of the car.

The roof is like a mirror the reflects the sky perfectly. There’s nothing but the roaring of wind in his ears and nothing but the stars around him. If this moment could last forever…

Well, can’t it?

He falls backward out of the window and does not watch the car growing smaller above/below him. He looks forward at the place where he knows the palm of the impossibly huge hand is. Sure, it’s millions of light years away, but he has an eternity to get there.

This optimistic moment ends when he realizes he can no longer breathe. His eyes flash dry and begin to ache, and he closes them tight against the cold vacuum. He’s going to die long before he reaches his destination, of course he is. But maybe his corpse will still reach it, billions of years from now.

He opens his eyes again. If he’s going to asphyxiate in space, he wants to die watching the stars.

And they are so beautiful. It takes him a long time to die, longer than he thought. Long after his eyes stick in their sockets and can no longer move. Long after his body panics and starts pumping his heart frantically to get the last molecules of oxygen to his brain. Perhaps long after blackness washes up over everything and he passes out.

 

He wakes in a hospital bed, aching dully all over his body, and looks around in confusion. He has _no_ idea how he got here. Was all of that a dream? He sits up, hisses, and presses the call button.

After a few minutes a nurse pokes his head in and seems to brighten slightly. “Oh, good, you’re awake! Do you remember what happened to you?”

“I… was out with the astronomy club,” he ventures.

“Yes, that’s right. Your friend Harriet said as much when she brought you in. She said you fell out of the car when you got a little too enthusiastic about stargazing. That was yesterday morning, and we weren’t able to properly check for a concussion because you were unconscious. Can I do some tests with you now?”

Jan submits to the nurse’s tests, which seem to find him in shockingly good health considering he fell out of a car going 90 kmph. No concussion, minimal bruising, and he can move just fine. He’s released the same day, and he can only be glad it was clear on a Friday night this month, because he doesn’t have to go into work today.

He texts the astronomy club group chat that he’s all right, dithers about whether to confront Harriet via text message, and then he tries to think of anyone else he could tell. He settles on texting Manuela, _If you were wondering why I wasn’t home yesterday, I had an accident and I’ve been in hospital. Mostly fine, coming back now._

Manuela replies simply, _OK_.

So Jan limps home and collapses onto the sofa in the gloomy sitting room. Manuela either isn’t in or is in her room, so he opens the window and cracks the curtain just enough to get a breeze, and falls asleep.

He wakes to a knock at the front door. He sits up and stares, and eventually it comes again, so he stands and shuffles groggily over to answer it. A pleasant-looking young man with a neatly trimmed beard is standing there, already with a half-smile on his face. He’s most likely selling something. “Hello?” says Jan.

“Hi, is this where Carter Chilcott lives?”

Jan stares at him.

“We met at a sort of work thing? I’m Evan Lukas.”

Jan’s face slides into a scowl. “I think the Lukases have done enough. Stay the hell away from Carter.”

“No, I’m sorry, that’s not the best introduction. I hate my family as much as you do. More, even. The truth is, I was trying to make it sound like a bit of a, well, a legitimate thing! But I crashed a work party he was at and he seemed so miserable I thought I ought to check on him.” Evan stops and looks over Jan’s shoulder. Is he looking at Carter?

“Can you _see_ him?” Jan asks.

Evan’s face creases into a frankly adorable smile (which Jan does not approve of) and he laughs. “I’m sorry! You both just asked the same question at the same time. It was very funny. Yes, I can see both of you.” His smile turns bitter. “After all, if the Lukases couldn’t see the people they torment, how would they keep track of them?”

“I still don’t trust your intentions,” Jan tells him.

“Frankly, I don’t see how I could make it worse. What, you think I’m going to kill him? No, sir, I’m going to do my best to reverse what’s been done. Before it’s too late.” He looks to the side again, as if he’s listening to Carter, and then nods. “Thank you. For trusting me. You want to come over to my place? Maybe people won’t be able to see you, but I promise you won’t feel lonely there.” He smiles his adorable smile at Carter, and then holds up his elbow as if he’s offering to escort a lady. “I’ll have him home before he turns into a pumpkin,” he tells Jan cheerfully.

“Tell him to text me when he gets home safe.”

“And your flatmate says text him when you get home safe.” He drops a wink and then closes the door after him.

There’s a thump from Manuela’s room, and Jan has to leave off looking suspiciously at the door to scramble to shut the curtains before she comes out.

“What was all that noise about?” she asks. Of course he can’t see her as more than a vague outline, but she sounds sleepy. Which is strange, because he’s pretty sure it’s afternoon. Maybe she finds it more convenient to be nocturnal on the weekends.

“Carter seems to have made a friend. That, or I just sent him off to the slaughter.”

“He’s a grown man, Jan. He can do what he wants.”

Jan scowls at the door again. It’s true. He can’t actually prevent a man he can’t see, hear, or touch from going anywhere he likes with a charming stranger.

“What, are you jealous?”

“Literally, who cares?”

He can hear her snorting with laughter as he goes back into his room.

 

He goes to sleep uneasily without getting any messages, but he wakes up to two texts from Carter, dated around two in the morning: _Home save! Kidn of drunk! Evans a good guyk_.

Then, _I’m going to cry. Love you_.

Jan looks at them for a bit, bemused, and then gets up to make breakfast. Manuela appears and sucks up a great quantity of sausage. While Jan is fumbling around trying to remember where he left his bag, she says, “My girlfriend’s visiting tonight.”

Jan stops. “You have a girlfriend?”

“Yes, I have a girlfriend.” The _idiot_ remains implied. “And she’s visiting tonight, so if possible find somewhere else to be, and if not, try not to be too weird.”

“How am _I_ weird? You’re the one who insists on absolute darkness at all times.”

“I _heard_ you climbing out a window Friday morning to avoid talking to me. You leave weird notes to our invisible flatmate who can’t read them. And you spend so much time with your telescope it might be _your_ girlfriend.”

These are all good points, which is irritating. Jan finds his bag and slings it over his shoulder, glowering at the darkness. “I’ll be perfectly quiet in my room. I can even climb in the window if you don’t want me to disturb you.”

She gives an amused “Hmh!” and he leaves for work.

Work is as it always is: concentration-consuming, meditative, and a little dull. Given how utterly stupid his life is, it’s good to be able to forget about everything but cell culture. But alas, his stupid life does not forget him.

One of Laurel’s friends, a physicist, stops by to congratulate her on her recent publication, and as Jan’s working he can hear her faintly over the hum of the freezers talking about the ‘weirdos in the lasers lab.’ “I swear to G-d one of the lab techs lives here. Like in the vents. He’s _never_ come out of the lab that I’ve seen. So naturally I go in there to talk to him and he’s like ‘Light! I’d forgotten what that’s like! But you should probably not do that.’ I’m like, what? Why? And he’s like ‘Manuela will eviscerate you, possibly.’ And I’m like, dude, do you need me to call the cops? Are you some kind of hostage? And he’s like, swear to G-d, he doesn’t know what cops are. Says, ‘I’m new to this planet,’ like, I don’t even know.”

Jan is not going to Manuela’s lab to see if she’s holding an extraterrestrial hostage. He’s _not_ , that would be a stupid idea for several reasons.

“I don’t mean to derail your celebration,” the physicist continues. “Like, it’s your paper! First author! That’s pretty damn cool! But I need your advice. Should I seriously call the cops on her?”

“Liv,” says Laurel’s amused voice under the hum of the freezers, “You’re getting pranked. They know their PI has a reputation for being a hardass and they’re playing on it.”

“You’re right,” says the physicist in obvious relief. “That probably should have been my first thought.”

Jan scowls at his pipettor. Some people will believe anything to preserve their worldview. Himself, he’s quite willing to believe that Manuela has imprisoned someone for use as a lab tech. He’s not willing to try to rescue that lab tech, because where could Jan possibly bring someone that his flatmate wouldn’t find out? But he might visit, if he ever finds himself in the physics building.

Jan almost forgets to go in the window when he gets home—it’s some hours after dark, so Manuela should already be back. He opens the window without really considering which one it is, before realizing that it’s covered by black curtains. He’s got the wrong one. Hurriedly he shuts it and edges over to the next window, through which if he squints he can see his own bed and messy desk. There’s very little chance Manuela and her girlfriend didn’t notice that. He immediately puts his headphones on and turns up his music so he won’t have to hear it if Manuela starts yelling at him.

Nevertheless, the next morning as he’s climbing out the window he can’t avoid getting her text— _I told you not to be weird. I know you’re sneaking out again. You’ll have to face me eventually, coward._

He texts back, _I’m really sorry. I was trying not to be weird. Is there anything I can do to make evisceration less likely when I do face you?_

_You’re picking up the shopping for the rest of the month. And if you really want to get on my good side, clean the bathroom. It’s disgusting._

If the bathroom is disgusting it’s probably Manuela’s fault, because she uses a bewildering array of products to make her already dark hair look like a black hole. But he’d rather be on her good side, so he just replies, _Okay._

Laurel is less than impressed when he tells her about it. “You’ve got to show some backbone eventually. Otherwise you’ll become her drudge.”

“I guess there’s a precedent,” he says gloomily. “You know? The guy she apparently keeps locked up in her lab?”

“Wait, that’s the same Manuela? Even if that was a prank, holy shit. Take my advice and multiply it by five. Stand up for yourself or she’s going to walk all over you!”

What is the worst she could do to him? Well, destroy all his stuff. But he’s quite sure some of the researcher-archivists he’s friendly with can pick locks. Maybe he should tell her that? Will it sound too much like a threat?

He’ll wait to grow a backbone until he’s back on her good side. And maybe collect stories about breaking and entering in the meantime.

 

The next time he makes her mad really isn’t his fault. She didn’t tell him her girlfriend was coming over in time for him to make other plans. He was already making dinner by the time she texted and didn’t have his phone on him, and so when the door opened and he saw two figures silhouetted against the light of the hallway all he could do was say, “Hello.”

“Hello,” says a nervous, unfamiliar voice. “Er, I’m Karolina.”

“Jan. Pleasure to meet you.”

“I’ll be right out, I need to get something,” says Manuela. He can see her glaring at him behind her dark glasses as she goes by, illuminated only by the stove light, which he turned on because it’s easy to turn off when she comes home.

“I didn’t have my phone,” he says weakly, gesturing with the tongs.

Manuela’s door shuts and Jan looks back at Karolina.

“Smells good,” she says.

“Yeah, I’m roasting beets and sweet potatoes for a salad.” He would say more, but something about her makes him uneasy. Something about her compact bearing, or her toneless voice, or the way her eyes seem to take everything in carefully without ever focusing on anything in particular. “You’re, er, welcome to have some when it’s finished.”

“Okay.”

Whoof. He drops the tongs on the stovetop and goes into the living room to open a window. Or two. As he reaches for the curtains he thinks he hears a small sound of indrawn breath behind him, as if Karolina is shocked by his presumption. When he finishes pushing the window open and turns back, her shoulders relax minutely. “What,” he says.

“Well… you climb out windows when you’re uncomfortable.”

He’s glad she can’t see his face flushing in the dim light from the kitchen. “I have to finish making dinner, so that would be…”

“Of course.”

She continues to stand near the door with her arms folded around herself, looking as if she would rather be anywhere else. The knob of Manuela’s door clicks, and he quickly turns the light off.

“Here it is,” she says as she emerges. “Come here.”

Karolina picks her way across the room with surprising certainty, considering that she’s only been here once before. Does she move mostly in the dark too? Where the hell did Manuela find another person who does that?

The two of them talk quietly, and Jan mostly ignores them because it takes so much concentration to make salad in the dark. Before each cut he has to very carefully make sure his fingers aren’t in the way of the knife. He does catch Karolina’s whispered, “I can’t help but imagine him scaling the wall of the building, like a lizard. It’s horrible.”

“We can always go to your place,” Manuela murmurs back.

Jan scowls down at his knife. Karolina has some nerve calling him creepy. He doesn’t scale walls like a lizard, it’s not like that, she’s being stupid, and he doesn’t want to have to stand here listening to her talking about him behind his back. Suddenly he longs to be in that star-studded infinity where all he can hear is the roaring wind. A gust blows in through the window and he closes his eyes, trying to imagine it. He takes a deep breath in, and lets it out.

Behind him, Karolina screams. “Stop it! Stop him!”

Jan turns to face into the wind and for the briefest moment he _can_ see the stars all around them, the colossal hand reaching toward Earth in sped-up time lapse motion as the stars spin. Then he blinks, and Karolina collapses to her knees on the floor. “What?” he says.

“Get out,” Manuela snaps.

“I have to finish—”

“Fuck your dinner, you’re freaking her out!”

He abandons the knife on the cutting board and tries to edge around Karolina and Manuela, who’s now crouching by her side with a protective arm around her shoulders. The whole flat is starting to creak ominously, and the ceiling seems to sag down toward him. Hell no, he’s not staying here for whatever freaky bullshit is happening because he accidentally brought outer space into the kitchen.

“I’m really sorry,” he says, crouched on the windowsill. “I don’t know what that wa—”

“Just get out!”

Manuela yells this so loudly and so suddenly that he startles and loses his balance. He seems to tip backward in slow motion, and then he falls headfirst toward the pavement. Stupidly, the only thing he can think is, I was supposed to die facing the sky.

He blinks, and he’s falling upward, though still very fast. He slows just as he reaches the edge of the roof, and by some instinct he manages to catch it and haul himself over. He lies on the cement, heart hammering, with _no_ idea of what’s just happened. Did he just… forget that he climbed up the side of the building? Did he _jump_ up the side of the building? He can’t tell where reality begins and where his hallucination ends. It all felt real.

When his heart has slowed down a little he climbs down to his own window, intending to weather Manuela’s anger with his headphones on, but inside it’s dark and cramped, like the walls have been squeezed inward. He’d be too afraid of being crushed in his sleep. So he darts in to get his phone, wallet, and keys, and then climbs down the building.

He walks away from the house with his hands shoved into his pockets, wondering where exactly he’s supposed to go. He’s not exactly swimming in money, so he’d prefer not to have to get a hotel room. And it’s a little late to try to catch a train to his mum’s in Edinburgh. He phones Tim, figuring he might be able to trade a spook story for a roof over his head.

“Hi, what’s up,” says Tim.

“Er…”

“Uh-oh.”

“My flatmate’s kicked me out for… hopefully just the night. Because of something, you know, spooky.”

“And you want to stay at mine?”

“I can… pay you?”

Tim sighs into the phone. “I’m not going to ask for _money_. That’d make me a bad friend, wouldn’t it.”

“What if I just sort of happen to leave some lying around?”

“Okay, okay. Sorry, I just really wasn’t ready for, uh, guests. I’ll text you my address. I don’t really have anywhere for you to sleep, I hope the sofa’s okay.”

“This is honestly more than I expected. Thank you.”

“Should I be insulted?”

“I mean, from anyone.”

Tim’s flat is much, much smaller than Jan’s. The majority of it is taken up with cardboard boxes and long bundles that could be skis or golf clubs or something… else. Is there a reason Tim was reluctant to have a guest over?

“Bit of a mess,” Tim mutters, kicking one of the boxes. It clinks.

“What’s in all these?”

“Just some stuff I couldn’t get rid of. I can shift them if you want to sleep on the floor. Might have a sleeping bag somewhere.”

“No, the couch is fine. I’m really sorry to ask this of you…”

“Nah.” Tim waves his hand vaguely and slouches into the kitchen. “This way I get to be the first to hear the hot goss on whatever spooky bullshit is happening to you now. You’re a total weird magnet, I don’t envy you that. You want pasta?”

“Sure.”

When the pasta is in the pot, Tim leans against the counter with a wooden spoon in his hand and raises his eyebrows as if to say, _Go on_.

“Er, okay, first you have to know that my flatmate’s girlfriend has been visiting recently. She thought I was weird before she even met me because I tried to climb in the wrong window.”

“Did you walk in—er, climb in on them…?”

“No! I don’t know. I heard her say she imagines me crawling up the side of the building like a lizard.”

Tim snorts. “That _is_ a pretty funny mental image.”

“She found it horrifying.”

“Sorry, actually, can we rewind to the part where you were climbing in the window of your own apartment?”

“I was _trying_ not to disturb them by going straight to my room. It backfired. The climbing in the windows thing isn’t important. Well, it’s kind of important. It’s just, Karolina couldn’t wait five minutes to tell Manuela how creepy I am so I wouldn’t have to hear it? She’s the creepy one, anyway. She stares, and she always smells damp. I wasn’t happy, but I was trying to stay calm, right, thinking about the vastness of space and how insignificant my problems are and how we’ll all be dust in a billion years anyway.” Tim raises his eyebrows. “It must have carried over to her somehow? I can’t imagine how she would have seen what I saw, but she screamed and collapsed. And then the room started—caving in on itself. I understandably freaked out and climbed out the window. Stop laughing,” he adds crossly. “What would you do if your flatmate’s creepy girlfriend started having a panic attack and the whole place started collapsing?”

“I’d go out the _door_ , first thing. So, hang on, do you mean literally collapsing? Like, all your stuff’s going to be gone when you get back? Like, your flatmates are probably dead, collapsing?”

“I…” Jan bites his lip hard, frustrated with himself. “I don’t know. It’s hard to trust any of my perceptions. There are people I can’t see, sometimes apparently I can be convinced to jump out a moving car if I happen to be hallucinating at the time, I just—just _miss_ chunks of time when I must be climbing and think… None of it makes sense! Look, is there anything in your archive like this? Contagious delusions?”

“You really jumped out a moving car?”

“Yeah, I was unconscious for a day and a half. That’s not the point. The point is I did it because I thought I was in deep space.”

“Uhh.”

Jan gives him a pleading look, and he holds up his hands as if conceding defeat.

“If anyone can find that out, it’ll be Jon. He’s been a little obsessed with your case, to tell the truth. I think the forbidden-by-the-powers-that-be angle really got to him. Course, it’d be easier to find anything if Gertrude had a filing system that anybody but her could understand, but he may have found something in the library. I can talk to him tomorrow.”

“I really can’t thank you enough.”

“It’s… it’s no trouble, Jan.”

“I just want you to know I appreciate how hard this is. You obviously don’t want me here, frankly it’s pretty obvious I’m crazy—”

“Shut up, Jan. Every fucking person in this world is crazy.”

 

Jan sleeps badly. His dreams are of millennia flitting past like seconds as the stars wheel dizzyingly around him—of something vast coming slowly, slowly closer. He wakes breathless, almost-satisfied, frustrated, and with an aching back. In the kitchen a spoon is clinking in a bowl. He disentangles himself from the blanket and rolls off the sofa, feeling a little guilty, oddly as though he’s had a wet dream in Tim’s house.

Tim pours a great deal of coffee down him and offers as much oatmeal as he wants but a limited quantity of strawberries. Then sends him off to work, sadly without his laptop. “I’ll call you tonight or at lunch break or something. I can try to get you Jon’s Skype, if he has one, or his number if he doesn’t.”

Jan can only thank him again, wishing it were enough.

Manuela grudgingly allows him back into the apartment that night. It no longer seems crushingly small. On the other hand there are no leftovers from the salad he was looking forward to, but he’s not really feeling up to having a spine today. He cleans the bathroom, and while he’s doing so gets a call from an unknown number.

He hastily washes his hands and answers. “Hello?”

“Jan Kilbride?”

“Oh, this is Jon, right?”

“Yes. Tim told me about your… further experiences.”

“Have you ever heard of anything like this? I mean, if I just knew what _kind_ of crazy I’m going…” He laughs weakly. Jon doesn’t seem the type to coddle, unlike Tim.

“I won’t categorically state that what you’re experiencing _is_ real,” says Jon cautiously. “But it is consistent with one of the statements I managed to find. I’ve copied it here. Hm. Statement of Elena Jackson… 2003… She was having hallucinations of ‘a web of wind encircling the world.’ She thought it was connected to a man she had met with an odd scar…”

“Like lightning? A scar like lightning?”

“Yes. How did you know.”

“Did she talk to him? Find out his name?”

“Do you know who this is?”

Jan swallows. “I mean, I know this guy with a lightning scar. Mike Crew. He _was_ in the car every time I hallucinated we were in deep space, but he seemed like he didn’t _want_ me to jump. He held me back. It was Harriet who told me to do it.”

“Harriet who?”

“Harriet Fairchild?”

Jon sounds in a great state of excitement now. “I know I have something on the Fairchilds in here. This is incredible. I never knew they were _connected_ before. Harriet Fairchild appeared in a statement as a skydiving instructor in connection with a man’s disappearance.” Jan feels cold, thinking about Niall. Simon told them he just had scheduling conflicts, but what if the first thing he said—that some people can’t handle _the sky as it is_ —was closer to the truth?

“Do you think she did something to me?” Jan whispers, not quite daring to interrupt Jon’s excited muttering.

“I don’t know what, and I don’t know how—can you talk to her? Find out? Can you ask her if she ever—no, that would be suspicious, wouldn’t it? Ask how she did it. Ask _what_ she did. I have a list of questions, actually, have you got a pen?”

 

Despite all the questions on the slip of paper in his pocket, Jan isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say to Harriet, considering he almost died and it might have been her fault. None of the questions are things he can ask. Nor does he feel she would answer them plainly. He sits nervously fiddling with the legs of his telescope in the front passenger seat, and finally he says, “Harriet, what actually happened last month? They couldn’t tell me much at the hospital.”

“What do you remember?”

“Well… I remember you telling me to jump out of the car window, and it would be fine because none of it was real.” Mike, in the back seat, makes some kind of unidentifiable noise, but when Jan turns to look at him he’s reading on his phone.

“And where were we when I said that?”

He turns to look out the window at the dark shapes blurring past, feeling oddly like a naughty child. “I don’t know exactly.”

“Jan, what did you see?”

“Stars, all around us. The hand of the fucking infinite millions of light-years away. It wasn’t real, and I accept that, but—”

“Who says it wasn’t real?”

“If it was real I asphyxiated in deep space, and obviously I didn’t.”

“Is that obvious?” She’s smiling now, out at the twilit road in front of them.

“Yes, Harriet! It’s bloody obvious I’m not dead!”

She takes a deep, contented breath and sighs it out. “Not every truth of reality precludes other truths of reality. It’s not necessarily so that when you died in space you couldn’t have also been cracking your head open in a ditch on the side of the road. You did die last month, Jan. And now you’re alive. Or something close enough.”

He suddenly, powerfully wants to leave. Jump out the car again and crack his head open in a ditch. Die looking at the stars, for perhaps the second time. Anything but be sitting here next to Harriet Fairchild, desperately facing away from whatever she’s trying to show him.

“Have you done anything strange or inexplicable since then?” she asks. “Have you fallen and failed to hit the ground? Have you seen the stars when you shouldn’t have?”

“How the hell would I know. Half of what I see isn’t real.” When she doesn’t reply immediately he says, “Just tell me straight out what you want to tell me. I can’t deal with this poetic bullshit right now. I just want to know what you _did_ to me.”

She sighs again. “I provided the seeds of your transformation, but if you had not been such fertile ground, they wouldn’t have blossomed.”

“I said no poetic bullshit. Please,” he says wearily.

“If I could be less poetic, Jan, I would. But there are some states of being that cannot be described in exact language. Some truths you can analyze, and some you can only feel in your bones. What you have become is one of the latter.”

“What I’ve _become_.”

“More than human. Outside humanity. A predator with all the power of the vast sky. We can teach you to use it.”

“Why would I want to use it? I never wanted any power! I just—love astronomy, that’s not a fucking life sentence.”

“We—”

“No, shut up. I don’t care. Whatever you have to say to me, I don’t care. I’m leaving the club, you’re clearly a bad influence.”

The car pulls up to their customary stargazing spot and Jan rips off his seatbelt, slams open the door to stomp away across the field. He doesn’t even set up the telescope, just sits in the cold damp grass next to it with his knees curled to his chest, looking up at the constellation that used to be Gemini before it was ripped in half. He refuses to think whatever poetic thing that should remind him of.

A wind tears through the field, making him blink grass and dust out of his eyes, and Mike says, “Can I sit?”

“ ‘s not my field,” Jan mumbles. Mike remains standing.

“I don’t remember what I was like before I became what I am,” says Mike. “Not clearly. Sometimes I get flashes. I was terrified, actually. In a lot of ways your transformation has been an easy one, because you didn’t think it was real.”

“What the hell does she want from me?”

“Focus on the predator part. Being what you are hurts humans, normal humans, I mean, so you might as well get something out of it.” He pauses, and maybe sees Jan shifting into an even tighter ball. “We’re sort of fear-powered.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Yeah, most of the people who work at, I don’t know, fucking Tesco or whatever, don’t like it either. But it pays the bills.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“The power goes out.”

“So I j—”

“You no longer have _any_ power that isn’t tied to Infinity. Not the power to breathe. Not the power to speak. Not the power to move. That’s what you lose.”

Jan uncurls to lie flat on his back, and lets all his breath out in a long sigh. “Great. Thanks for… not beating around the bush, I guess.”

“Good luck,” says Mike. He sounds sad. Then he goes, and Jan is left alone with the sky.

 

Sometime between one and two in the morning, as Jan is getting out of Harriet’s car (after a long, silent, and horribly awkward drive through deep space), his phone rings. He answers it without looking at the caller, and hears what sounds like a crowd of people all talking at once, as if he’s being called from a restaurant.  “Hello?”

“Jan? Jan! Can you hear me?”

“Who is this?”

“I’m at a party. Like a good one though.” The person on the other end _sounds_ like they’re at a party. They sound drunk. “And like three different people here can see me!”

“Carter?”

“I dunno if you’re actually there or not? I’m drunk enough I don’t care. Three people! Evan says I can learn to turn visible if I, pfffffkh, have self-worth or something?” Carter starts laughing, louder than the phone mic can take, and Jan holds it away from his ear.

“That’s wonderful,” he manages. The lonely dread that’s been hollowing out his insides recedes a little. He can at least be happy for Carter if he can’t be happy for himself. “I can’t wait to meet you.”

“Where are you? Are you up on a cliff? ‘Cos it sure is windy over there, huh?”

Jan glances uneasily down the street. The night is perfectly still.

“Well, anyway, I’ll seeeeee you later. I think I’ll actually see you. Maybe not tomorrow. ‘Cos I’m gonna have a hangover! Bye!”

He stands looking at his phone, trying to keep the tiny flame of vicarious happiness from going out in the immense wind. It doesn’t last long.

He doesn’t see Carter the next day, or the day after that. But it’s still relatively fresh in his mind when the door of Carter’s room opens for the first time he can remember. The man who steps out is tall and thin, with wide watery eyes and masses of curly blond hair. Jan takes a moment to stare, because if he ever imagined how Carter looked, it was nothing like this.

“Carter?” he ventures.

“Manuela?”

Jan keeps staring. He doesn’t _think_ he looks like a Manuela Dominguez. And Carter sounds pretty different in person, but to be fair Jan could barely hear him over the noise of whatever party he was at. After a long pause he says, “No. It’s Jan. We spoke on the phone just a few days ago.”

“Did we? I don’t recall that. Well, I’m looking for Manuela. I have no business with you. I heard she lived here.”

That stings a bit, after all the care Jan has showed him and Manuela definitively hasn’t. He was _going_ to congratulate Carter on his visibility, but he couldn’t possibly, now. “She’s most likely asleep,” he says. “She’s nocturnal on weekends. That’s why I’ve got the curtains open.”

“Oh! That’s fine, then. I’ll just go through her things.”

“What? Why?” Jan moves to block Carter as he starts toward the sitting room, where Manuela left her laptop and some papers she was editing.

“I am here to be a nuisance,” says Carter, still smiling widely. “Get out of my way, please.”

“She’s going to be furious. Probably at me, since she’s never seen you!”

Carter lays a hand on Jan’s shoulder, and his unexpectedly sharp fingernails dig in. “I can stick around. I wouldn’t want her to think it was anyone but me. That would just be irresponsible, now, wouldn’t it?” Jan is too confused to really stop him when he pushes Jan away and heads toward the kitchen instead. He starts opening all the cupboards and peers into them as if he’s never seen inside before. He pulls out a jar of honey and regards it for a moment before letting it slip out of his grasp and smash on the floor.

“Carter, what the _hell_?”

He looks around, holding a jar of jam.  “Who _is_ Carter?”

Jan’s stomach drops. “You came out of his room.”

“I came out of his _door_ ,” says the man who is not Carter. “That is different.” He doesn’t even seem to notice when he drops the jam too and it smashes all over his feet. “I’ll show you.” He walks back past Jan, tracking jam and broken glass over the floor, to open the door of Carter’s room. Jan doesn’t remember it being painted yellow, but he doesn’t trust his memory any more than he trusts his eyes. Case in point: inside is not a bedroom but a long hallway lined with pictures of something or other, curving gently to the left until it curves out of view altogether some hundred meters away. “See,” says the man who is not Carter. He closes the door again and turns his wide, unsettling smile on Jan. “Now you try.”

“What? Why?”

“To see what’s inside, of course!”

Jan regards the doorknob dubiously. “Will you go away if I do?”

Manuela’s door bursts open and she stumbles out, squinting. “You again! Get out of here! Why the fuck are you in my _house_?”

“To inconvenience and annoy,” says the man cheerfully. He holds up a jar of Nutella as he opens the door again with a loud creak. “I’m taking this. It seems fun. Goodbye, Manuela.” And it closes behind him.

She screams frustration through her gritted teeth and kicks the door. “Fuck you, Distortion!”

“Who was that?” Jan asks.

“Avatar of It-Is-Not-What-It-Is,” she grumbles, as if that string of words means _anything_ to Jan. “It’s been fucking with me for weeks now. Almost took a grad student at my lab. Wouldn’t have missed him much, but it’s the principle of the thing.”

“I’m sorry, a what of _what_.”

She gives him one of those looks that means she thinks he’s being very stupid. “An avatar. You’ve got to know what an avatar is, you are one. It-Is-Not-What-It-Is is just one of the more annoying powers out there. Now try not to get stabbed again, I’m going back to sleep.”

Stabbed? He looks down at himself and finds a red stain spreading down the shoulder of his shirt where the avatar—Distortion—touched him. Ah.

 

Jan texts Mike, the only person who both seems to know anything about this whole _thing_ and can be trusted to tell him. Mike doesn’t get back to him until Friday evening, when he’s on the sofa in the sitting room trying and failing to read a paper on real-time mass spectroscopic identification of cancerous cells.

_Avatar is a word some people use for things like us, predators. Not poetic enough for Harriet. It-Is-Not-What-It-Is is one thing you can be an avatar of, in the same way we’re avatars of Infinity. Hope I’m doing all right at How To Be Magic 101._

_Certainly better than anyone else_ , Jan types. But he doesn’t send that message, because when he glances up at Manuela coming through the room it’s not Manuela at all. It’s a round-faced man with a crew cut, holding his shoes in one hand as he makes his way across the carpet.

“Carter?”

He looks around, and his face seems to light up. “Jan, is that you? Holy shit. It’s—it’s great to see you.”

Jan pockets his phone and gets up. Carter’s already holding out his hand to shake, but Jan takes it and pulls him into a hug. “I’m happy for you.”

“Y’can’t make me cry on my way to a party,” says Carter, patting Jan’s back. “But, thank you. It means a lot.”

Jan pulls away and takes a deep breath, surveying Carter to try and memorize him. “You, uh, off to Evan Lukas’?”

“Yeah. Hey, you know, you’re welcome to come. I’m sure he’d love to see you again, and his friends are great. I’d love to introduce you to his fiancée.”

“Er, yeah? Okay?”

Jan isn’t really dressed to go out, but he’s not particularly invested in impressing Evan Lukas’ friends anyway, so he follows Carter down the stairs and then to the underground. This is the point where he loses Carter altogether. It doesn’t bother him at first, thinking he’ll catch a glimpse of him through the Friday night crowd, but three stops later he isn’t sure where to get off and he’s starting to panic.

 _Where are you? What’s our stop?_ he asks, and stands anxiously looking at his phone for a reply.

_Paddington. We’re going to Woking._

Then, _I’m glad to hear from you. Nobody on the train has a face right now and it’s a bit bad. I think you’ll be able to see me once we’ve gotten off._

 _I hope_.

So Jan spends the rest of the ride looking around and continually checking to make sure they don’t lose each other. Carter doesn’t seem to mind it. In fact, he might be trying to soothe Jan by explaining the general principles of ocean currents, with pictures he’s apparently looking up on Wikipedia in real time. Shockingly, they make it to Woking Station with no incident, and when Jan comes out of the building there’s Carter looking extremely relieved to see him.

Carter continues his monologue on currents as they walk along the river. Jan isn’t going to retain much, but it’s comforting nonetheless. And they find themselves outside a large house with all the lights on. They don’t even need to knock, because the door is just _open_ despite the cold night.

When Carter steps in Evan Lukas swoops on him to embrace him. “You’re looking in fine form tonight, Carter!” he says. “And I see Jan’s come with you! I’m so glad you could make it,” he adds to Jan, as if they were expecting him. “I know we got off a bit on the wrong foot the first time we met, but if there’s anything I can do to make you more comfortable, let me know. This is Naomi—” he gestures to the woman with her arm around Carter—“my fiancée.”

“The famous Jan Kilbride,” says Naomi, clasping his hand. “This is probably a bit overwhelming. I find it overwhelming sometimes. And here we’re not even letting you speak!”

“Er, thank you?” Jan blinks at her and Evan uncertainly. Nobody has ever been this happy to see him in his life, including family members. “I sort of came here by accident. I was just a bit excited to see Carter.”

Evan and Carter smile at each other like they’re the only two people in the world. “You’re doing so well,” Evan tells him.

Jan lets Evan steer him around the room and eventually deposit him in a group of people who seem to have nothing at all in common except their current debate on which kinds of flowers make the prettiest public garden. But he’s a bit confused. Evan _is_ engaged to be married, but the way he looks at Carter… do friends look at each other like that, and Jan never noticed? He watches Evan move around the room and through various conversations, and, well, maybe _Evan_ looks at all his friends like that. As if whoever he is talking to at that moment is the only person who matters.

He _is_ a Lukas.

But Jan can’t resent Evan Lukas forever. With a little wine and a few spirited arguments in him, he finds himself squashed into Evan’s side on the sofa playing charades. When Evan puts an arm around his shoulders, laughing, in celebration, he fancies he understands how Carter feels, a bit. So, for tonight, he grins and puts his arm around Evan in return.

 

After that he sees Carter more frequently. He’s there the first time Manuela sees him, fresh out of the shower; she stops in her tracks, blinking, and then nods at him. “Chilcott.”

Carter turns, looking bemused. “Dominguez?”

“You’ve learned some control, then. Useful.”

And that’s all Carter is getting out of her. She shoulders her way past him to get to the snack cupboard, and then retreats to her room.

Carter raises his eyebrows at Jan in the gloom, and Jan grins. “She won’t be out for a while,” he says. “I’m going to open the curtains.

“So what’s, you know, what’s her deal?”

“I really, genuinely could not tell you. I’ve heard she’s trapped an alien in her lab to be a tech, but that could have been a post-doc taking the piss. And apparently she’s being stalked by an avatar of… er, It’s-Not-What-You-Think-It-Is? Evan tell you about avatars?”

“A bit, yeah. He said I’m one now as well as him, but he was a bit cagey on what that means.”

“Oh. You too. My mate Mike says it means you’ve got to kill people or something.”

“Evan doesn’t kill people!”

“I never said he does.”

“Hm.” Carter turns away moodily, showing his profile. “She okay, then? If this avatar’s after her? Maybe she’s like that because she’s stressed out.”

“Dunno. She said he almost got one of her grad students.”

“Why don’t we have a look for ourselves, then?”

And so, during Manuela’s lunch break next day, Jan and Carter visit the lasers lab with DOMINGUEZ-MILLER GROUP printed by the door. As expected it’s very dim inside, lit only by orange emergency lights. Jan can imagine Laurel’s friend turning on her phone to see by as she entered the large black cube that’s been sectioned off for really photosensitive work.

“Who are you?” asks a voice from somewhere on the other side of the room. At first Jan can’t tell where it’s coming from, but then he realizes that the speaker blends in with the walls because both his skin and his clothing seem to be pale grey.

“We live with Manuela. I’m Carter and this is Jan.” Carter waits for a few hopeful seconds before he asks, “What’s your name?”

“David. I don’t know if you’re supposed to be in here, but…” David sighs. “I do wish we got more visitors. Still, at least the food here is solid.”

“Are you actually from space?” Carter asks.

“Yes? Oh! No, no I’m not. I’ve been told to tell you I’m not from space.”

“By Manuela?”

“By Gerald. I don’t think Manuela really cares one way or the other. Almost nobody believes me anyway.”

“Well, have you ever seen a door that shouldn’t be there? In the lab?”

“What a curiously specific question. Would you expect someone to have come out of this door? A tall, er, wibbly sort of person?”

“Yes! Has that happened more than once?”

“Oh, loads of times. Mostly they just poke their head out, realize nobody’s here, and close the door again. I’m not sure they’ve really grasped the fact that the lasers lab runs on a schedule. Sometimes they fiddle with something on the ceiling. Once they asked if I’d like to come in and I asked if it was nice in there and they said no, it was horrible. So I stayed in my cupboard. Oh! I’ve been told to tell you that I don’t live in a cupboard. I live in something called an apartment.”

Jan and Carter exchange a look. Maybe this guy really isn’t from Earth. “What’s preventing you from leaving?” Jan asks him.

“Mainly the fear of Manuela’s wrath. But also she feeds me. I’ve been told there isn’t ‘free’ food elsewhere, whatever that means.”

They’re still explaining social services to David when Manuela and some of her assistants come back from lunch. She stops dead in the doorway to stare coldly at Jan and Carter. “I don’t understand how _none_ of you feel bad about keeping David locked up here,” Carter snaps at all of them. The assistants look away and shuffle their feet. Manuela continues to stare directly at him.

“I pay him in room and board, and there’s nothing keeping him here. The lab doesn’t lock from the inside, for safety reasons.”

Carter, full of righteous anger, begins to go off on her about financial coercion. Jan attempts to look supportive and like he knows what Carter’s talking about, but he’s distracted by a door that seems to have appeared in the middle of one of the lab benches, which warps around it in a way that makes his head hurt. He glances at David, who’s also paying more attention to the door than to the argument. Then back at the door, which cracks open to reveal a slice of Distortion’s smiling face blocking the bright light streaming out. He somehow manages to slide out a two-centimeter-wide gap, then sidles toward David at the back of the room.

“Oi,” says Jan loudly. “Can you explain It’s-Not-What-You-Think-It-Is?”

Distortion starts to laugh. “No? What is that?”

“It’s-Not-What-You-Saw? Er, It’s-Not-What-You-Thought-You-Saw. No, hang on, that wasn’t it. Whatever the power is called that you’re an avatar of!”

Distortion straightens and looks upward toward the corner of the ceiling, performing some kind of complicated gesture with his many-jointed hands. Jan follows his gaze to a wall-mounted security camera. Why would he be mugging for whoever watches the security feeds?

By this time Manuela has noticed the intruder, so Distortion stops what he’s doing and turns his hand as if he were holding a doorknob. A slice of that strange corridor appears and Distortion slides in again with a final “Goodbye, Manuela!” Jan thinks he hears someone else talking inside for a moment, but if so they’re drowned out by Manuela screaming, “STAY OUT OF MY LAB!”

The lab is silent for a moment while everyone watches her glower at the place where the door wasn’t, and then she climbs up onto the nearest bench, picks up a length of c-channel, and smashes the security camera to pieces. “Try watching me now, you bastard,” she says breathlessly. Then looks down at Jan and Carter. “You two, I’ve got actual work to do. If you really want to have a debate you can try to break into my room at home. Go away.”

Jan takes Carter’s arm and steers him out of the room. Retreat for now.

 

In early November Jan gets sick. At first he thinks it’s just flu season, but it gets worse and worse until he can barely leave his bed. He spends a lot of time floating in space, because he aches a bit less without any gravity. At this point he’s not sure about the passage of time but he _thinks_ he hasn’t eaten in days.

In his delirium he dreams that he crawled down the wall of the building, just like a lizard, and lay sprawled on the pavement, waiting and hoping pathetically for someone to notice him and call an ambulance.

But when someone does stop next to him and fuzzily ask if he’s okay, that isn’t what he asks for. He unfolds himself from the ground and grabs their shoulders to keep them from backing away. It’s not like this is a _real_ person. Just a fuzzy sort of shape. So it’s not bad of him to show them the stars that frightened Karolina so much. “Look,” he croaks. “Isn’t it beautiful?” He turns to point back at the tiny speck of the Earth. “That’s nothing. This is everything, but that’s nothing. You could crush it between your fingers.” He demonstrates; seven billion people die without a sound. “I think it’s amazing that you can be big enough to crush the Earth like that but still be so, so small compared to everything else. We’re nineteen _billion_ meters tall and just this one galaxy is still a thousand times thicker than that. Look out there, through the veil of stars. Trillions of other galaxies, so far away they look small.”

He takes a trembling hand and leads them up the stairs in the side of the Milky Way, until they stand on top of it like a little platform, looking out at the constellations of galaxies. “I don’t even know the names for the numbers that describe how big we are,” he says happily. “And we’re still so, so, _so_ small.”

“Please,” whispers a small voice. But there’s no air in space, so he can’t be hearing it, so he isn’t.

“It’s so beautiful,” he says again. If even figments of his imagination can’t understand, what hope does he have? “Do you ever think about eternity?”

“I don’t want to,” says the voice that isn’t. “Please stop it.”

Jan loves to think about eternity. It’s so soothing. “None of this matters. Your life doesn’t matter. No-one you love matters. Especially now that they’re all dead.”

He gives the woman an encouraging smile, and he can see she’s crying, hugging her arms tight around herself as if that can make everything as small as she is. She falls to her knees on the cold wet pavement, dropping her handbag, and curls into a ball.

“Miss?” says Jan anxiously. “Are you all right?”

But the only sound that comes from the little ball of her is muffled sobbing. “Should I… call someone?” he asks. “Are you having a panic attack? Does this happen a lot? I’m sorry I’m being so unhelpful, all these questions are probably making it worse, um,  I’m so sorry, I wish I could help.”

He doesn’t even know how he _got_ here. He doesn’t know who this woman is. “I’ll just… go, then? I’m so sorry I couldn’t be of more use.” He hurries off for work, but realizes when he gets to the tube station that he doesn’t have his card. He’s also, now that he thinks of it, not wearing any shoes despite the frost on the ground. So he hurries home instead.

He’d like to ask Tim what the hell is happening to him, but he’s trespassed on Tim’s hospitality too much already. The next option is Jon, he supposes, who _will_ listen but probably will also be no help whatsoever. He’ll say, “That’s _fascinating_ , we’ve never seen anything like this before!” Mike? He and Mike have barely exchanged two dozen words. Carter has his own problems to be dealing with.

Which is how Jan finds himself in Woking at eleven in the morning, wearing a coat over his pyjamas and feeling vaguely guilty for skipping work, even though he _thinks_ he told his PI he’d be out all week. Evan probably won’t even be here, he’s got to be at work.

Jan knocks anyway. There’s a bit of noise from inside, and then Naomi Herne opens the door, wearing a bright smile that looks as if she’s just dusted it off and put it on. “Jan? Come in. What’s going on?”

“I… probably shouldn’t bother you about it,” he says, but he comes in anyway. “I was sort of hoping to talk to Evan, but, er, I wasn’t thinking clearly. Of course he’s not here.”

“Ah, yes, it’s my day off. What did you want to talk to him about?”

“Do you know anything about… avatars?” Jan asks hopelessly.

Naomi’s smile takes on a strained quality, and fades. “Ah. One of those things. Is this about Carter?”

“No, I… although I’m not sure he knows as much he ought. I’m, er, I’m one too, and I think it’s doing something very strange to me.”

“This calls for tea,” says Naomi. Possibly she just wants something to do with her hands, an excuse not to look at him. Jan certainly wishes his hands could be busy as he stands awkwardly on the threshold of the kitchen.

“How much _do_ you know?”

“Avatars are basically frightening people who’ve got to hurt others. We haven’t told Carter that. He’s got to get comfortable with himself first, or it might undo everything. Evan found a way to get around it, though, sort of. I don’t really understand it, and you probably _should_ talk to him. But he helps people instead of hurting them. He takes the loneliness inside them, inside us, and turns it into something that can be good.”

“He’s a real saint,” mumbles Jan. “Dunno if I could work as hard as he does. It seems… exhausting.”

Naomi laughs, and seems to relax a little. “Doesn’t it? He’s always _on_. Even when it’s just the two of us. The only time I ever see him tired is when his dad calls.” She catches Jan’s hopeless expression and adds, “But I’m sure there’s a way you can make it work without having Evan’s infinite energy. Do you… want to tell me what’s going on? You—you don’t have to.”

“You’re going to think I’m literally insane. I probably am.”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

She turns away to get the kettle, and somehow this gives him the strength to take a deep breath and speak. “I’ve been hallucinating deep space for a while. It was the astronomy club’s fault originally, I honestly think they might have been some kind of front, though for what I have no idea. A guy disappeared, I dunno. Then I… died. Jumped out a moving car. But see, I don’t remember it. There are times when all I remember is the stars, and then I wake up and I’ve done something terrible. I was really, really sick this week, delirious, and I had a dream that I took this woman into space with me, and then I woke up and she was crying on the pavement. I don’t know what I did to her. I _can’t_ know. But Naomi, it was all my own choice. I just… choose differently when I think something’s happening that’s not. I don’t know what to do.” He stops there, because otherwise she’ll hear that he’s crying.

“Evan used to get sick,” says Naomi slowly. “He’d have these episodes of heart palpitations. They were so strong I swear I could hear them from across the room, like his heart was pounding to get out of his chest. He’d… well, he’d hold me. And—” she laughs self-consciously—“I know this sounds cheesy, but it was like his heart would slow down to match mine. I asked him if he needed to see a doctor, but he said it wasn’t something doctors could help with. It was an avatar thing.”

_And if I don’t hurt people?_

_The power goes out_.

“I know it probably doesn’t help you. Your situation’s different. But, um, a lot of Evan’s friends are dealing with mental illnesses. It can be very isolating. You don’t _want_ to hurt people. You just have to figure this out, and I know you can.”

“Yeah… thank you. Can you tell Evan to call me? When he’s back?”

“Of course, if you leave your number. You can have mine, too, if you want.”

They drink their tea in awkward silence for a while, looking out the wide windows of the house. Naomi starts reading a book, and after some hesitation, Jan picks up a thick new issue of ACR from the coffee table. Might as well see what chemists are doing these days.

 

Jan tries, he really does. He unfocuses his mind until he slips into deep space and then asks himself whether he would hurt someone. And the answer, of course, is still no. But that’s not really the point, because he never has decided to hurt someone. He’s decided, again and again, to admire the beauty of the cosmos, and he _still_ doesn’t understand how it ends in people getting hurt.

He asks Carter, on Saturday night when they’re cooking together, whether he’s hurt anyone yet. As soon as it comes out of his mouth, he regrets _yet_ , but there’s no taking it back.

 “I’m hoping I can do what Evan does,” says Carter evenly.

“Have you gotten sick?”

Carter only keeps chopping carrots.

“Does it feel like your heart is going to burst out of your chest?” A moment later he regrets that too. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It does. It makes me feel like I have to… take something from someone. The thing that makes them another person. That doesn’t make sense.”

Jan gloomily contemplates the celery under his knife. The feeling that he needs to take something from someone else. Yes, that’s familiar. “You could take it from me. I don’t need it.”

“Jan.”

“I’m giving you permission.”

“Then you’ve got to let _me_ suffer your cosmos.” He says it as if it’s some kind of trump card that will win him the argument they may or may not be having, but Jan just says,

“All right. It’s your choice.”

Carter’s knife is a little louder, a little more staccato, and when Jan glances at him his shoulders are tense and angry. He probably shouldn’t be cutting vegetables like that. He’ll cut off a finger. Maybe he’d be fine, just as Jan was fine when he jumped out a car going at 90 kmph.

How did Carter die?

It seems much too personal a question to ask, especially when he’s angry with Jan for some unfathomable reason. So Jan doesn’t ask it. He carefully slices the celery into even pieces and dumps them into the pot, then starts in on the onions, which he really should have done first. Perhaps he ought to start keeping track of how long it takes to get sick, so he can take care of it before he gets delirious and does something stupid. It’s worse, somehow, to think of premeditating it. To think of taking responsibility. It’s worse to tell himself that he is in control.

“You want to have a go while the soup’s boiling,” says Carter.

“Sure. Just let me finish up with the onions.” He dumps them into the frying pan and pokes them around in the oil a bit, then turns to Carter, who is frowning at him, arms crossed over his chest.

“I can’t just… do it. With you looking at me.”

Jan closes his eyes. He tries to stay present instead of drifting into space, focusing on the stinging in his eyes and sizzling of the onions behind him.

The floor creaks and dips just slightly as Carter steps toward him. He thinks he can feel, somehow, Carter’s hand hovering just over his heart, not quite touching his chest. As if there’s some gravity there. And then he can’t feel it any more. It’s the oddest sensation, _becoming_ alone with another person standing right in front of him. He opens his eyes, and he’s _looking_ at Carter, but he feels as if Carter isn’t himself. Or Jan isn’t himself. One of them is no longer there, but he can’t say which one it is.

“You’re crying,” Carter mutters, as if disappointed.

“It’s the onions,” says Jan. He doesn’t move to wipe away the tears streaming down his cheeks. They don’t sting his eyes at all. “That wasn’t that bad. I think you’ve got the hang of Evan’s thing already.”

“You do me, then,” he says, defiant. Unnecessarily so, in Jan’s opinion.

Right. So. He has to take something from Carter, he doesn’t know what it is, and he’s trying _not_ to hurt him. He lets space unfurl slowly from inside him until the kitchen is a cathedral. Carter seems to shrink into himself, so he tries to dial it back. The window is open, since it’s nighttime, he can work with that. He walks over to it and throws it wide. Wider. Wider. Outside there’s no street, just the sky. “It’s nice, right? It’s not very frightening.”

He looks at Carter, who’s gripping the windowsill tight, leaning slightly out into the night sky. “Really, you can see to the edge of the observable universe _every_ night.”

But he can tell that whatever he was out to take, he’s taken it. Carter is small, fragile, and certain of his own eventual destruction. The stars fade with Jan’s hope and he mumbles, “Sorry.” He doesn’t have Carter’s control. He doesn’t even know what it would look like for him to have control.

“Can you just… touch me. I need to feel real.”

Jan puts an arm around Carter’s shoulders and turns him away from the window. In the stove light he can see that Carter is crying too, his jaw clenched and mouth stretched in a grimace he’s trying to conceal. Carter leans into him next to the pan of onions, and it’s like Jan is trying to comfort himself by wrapping his arms around himself, and neither of them says a word.

 

Tuesday night Manuela is already home from work when Jan comes back—she can leave earlier in the winter, he supposes. She’s having a hushed conversation with Carter, but when he comes in she looks around angrily.

“Turn off your phone,” she snaps. “Is your computer in there? That’s got to go too.”

“Sorry, what?”

“They’re spying on me through electronic devices,” she says impatiently. “You do know you can hack a phone’s microphone to be on even when you’re not making a call? Turn it _off_.”

He turns his phone off and buries it with his computer under several layers of blankets in his room. When he comes back she says, “What about that watch?”

He looks down at his digital watch. “It’s not like it’s connected to the internet.”

“Get rid of it.”

He puts it with the rest and then returns again, arms crossed over his chest as if daring Manuela to find something else he has to hide. Carter, who’s sprawled on the couch, catches his eye and gives him a shrug and a grimace, as if acknowledging the necessity of this paranoia.

Manuela sits back down on the arm of the chair. “Right,” she says. “Keep going.”

“Yeah. Er, so I got to the bit where I found the thumb drive? Right. Well, there wasn’t a drive that matched it showing up on the computer, so I opened up the command prompt to hunt around some obscure directories. You know what the command prompt is?”

“Yeah, vaguely, but I really don’t care.”

“Okay, well, I did find something interesting. You’d say that the computers in your lab aren’t connected to the internet or any other part of the building, right?”

“Yeah. We make absolutely sure our instruments can’t get viruses by scrubbing every data transfer drive after it comes into contact with another computer.”

“Well, there was a hard connection from the security office to your lab. I, er, didn’t have time to actually look for it but if you like I could go in again tomorrow. That was about all I found out, because that’s the point the command prompt started talking to me. It said I was a bad programmer and if I were better I might have actually done something to stop it. And it called me by name. I asked how it knew that and it… well, it knew other things about me that it shouldn’t have known. It said it got them off my phone while I’d been standing there. And it said it knew a lot about you as well, Manuela.”

Grim-faced, Manuela gestures for him to continue.

“I asked them what their problem was with you, but it wouldn’t answer. Er… ‘I know things about you and you know nothing about me, have fun ever sending an email or text message again.’ That’s what it said, something like that. Then the command line closed and, as I was a bit freaked out, I decided to leave and come tell you.”

“So whoever this bastard is they have a remote connection to either the computer itself or the drive.”

“I’d already taken the drive out by that point,” says Carter, and he digs in his pocket to show them a thumb drive with a golden engraving of an open eye.

“Beholding!” Manuela hisses, recoiling from it. “You brought that _in_ here?”

“What? It’s not like you could fit a mic on this thing.”

“I don’t trust it.”

“That’s literally not how it works,” says Carter patiently. “Anyway, yeah, they had a remote connection to the computer, so theoretically it’s trackable, but I’m a modeller, not a cybersecurity specialist.”

“Then we’re at a dead end,” says Manuela.

Jan says nothing just then, because it’s possible that something unseen _is_ going on with the drive, but he has an idea. And on Wednesday he takes a long lunch to visit the Magnus Institute and have tea with Sasha.

“It’s been a while,” she says. “How’ve you been? I hope the space stuff isn’t giving you too much trouble.”

“Er… Well, no, it really is. How are you?”

She laughs. “I’m doing great, actually. I like our work here a lot. It’s sort of like a big puzzle, slowly putting together the pieces on how everything connects. Don’t tell Tim, he’d make fun, but Jon and I made one of those string boards to see if we can group up some of the more interesting statements by similarity.”

“Is it here? Can I see it?”

“No, we couldn’t run the risk Tim would find it. But I’ve got pictures. Look.”

“This is… honestly incredible. I guess seeing it at higher resolution would violate some kind of NDA.”

“Maybe! Anyway, did you come just to see our cool string board, or did you want something?”

Jan puts his phone on the table and very deliberately turns it off. Holding eye contact with Sasha, he turns hers off too. “You got your laptop with you?” he asks.

“No, but I could—”

“No, that’s good. Anything else with internet connection?” She shakes her head. “Sorry, just got to be a bit careful. My flatmate’s being, er, cyberstalked by someone who… well, I don’t know how computer stuff works, but they can do things that aren’t normal. Carter just _stood_ by a computer and somehow they hacked into his phone and found out a bunch of personal information about him.”

Sasha gives a low whistle. “And you want me to use my hacker skills to…?”

“Figure out where this person actually is.”

“I could _try_ , but it sounds like they’re better than me. Tracing IP addresses isn’t…” She stops, looking amused at Jan’s polite incomprehension. “In summary, I can try, if you get me a computer they’re actively transferring data from.”

 

And this is how, rather surprisingly, Jan comes to have the name and address of the person targeting Manuela: Michael Yardsley, of Dulwich. The name means nothing to him, but when he tells Manuela on the rooftop that night her face darkens in anger.

“Of course it’s Yardsley,” she spits. “Not only does he recruit his idiot friends to defame Max, that’s not enough, he’s got to spy on me as well? Max does all his research offline, so of course that wouldn’t work. I’m going to wring his neck myself.”

“Shouldn’t we have a plan or something?” asks Carter, arms folded around himself against the cold. He seems to be watching Jan nervously as if he expects him to fall off the edge of the roof where he’s sitting.

“It’s three on one. What kind of plan do we need?” Manuela smiles cruelly at Carter. “You learn how to send people to another plane of existence yet, Chilcott?”

“It wasn’t really my focus,” he says primly. “I’ve been putting my energy toward helping people instead. Primum non nocere.”

“Well. You don’t have to come. But at least Jan can always be relied on to ruin someone’s day.”

“I won’t come either if you’re going to be like that.”

He can actually see the moment Manuela realizes she might have to be nice to someone for once in her life if she wants help. Her face twitches, and then smooths into a more pleasant expression. “Sorry,” she says. “That was uncalled-for. Just that you have a natural talent for… overwhelming people, let’s say.” That’s not really much better—Carter gives a quiet snort of disbelief—but at least she’s trying. “And Chilcott, I’m sure it’d be, er, beneficial to your… development… if you… gave yourself an example what not to do? It should come naturally. It’s the intended use of your power, after all.”

“How do you… know that?” asks Jan. “You seem to know a lot about all of this.”

“Yeah? I’m an avatar of the Darkness. Have been for years. I rather thought that was obvious.”

Carter shifts uncertainly, folding his arms the other way. “Then you hurt people too?”

She shrugs. “Not many. It’s a requirement for my work. You get used to it. To return to the actual subject at hand, avatars of Beholding aren’t really much good up close. I can incapacitate him easily, and if you two would be so good as to put him somewhere he can’t cause any more trouble, we can be done with this stupid business.”

“Want to go now?” asks Jan. “Sasha wrote down directions for me.”

“Yes,” says Manuela, already striding toward the access door. “Let’s get this over with.”

They travel mostly in silence; the bulk of the conversation is in the bemused looks Carter and Jan occasionally exchange, although in the hubbub of the underground Manuela does lean close to murmur, “He’s watching right now.”

That thought is much more unnerving than him spying on Manuela’s lab, because it implies that he can see them _anywhere_. So they make it to Dulwich without any single incident but growing more and more paranoid. Only Carter seems relaxed, and when Jan asks him why he smiles crookedly. “How many months have I been wishing someone knew I was there? And it’s not like he’s going to get away.”

The door of Yardsley’s apartment is locked, but Jan has plenty of practice getting in windows. Before he can look around the brightly lit room he unlocks the door, so he’ll have backup. As soon as Manuela walks in, the lights flicker and dim to something more more comfortable. And Jan takes in a neat sitting room packed with history books and brightly colored knick-knacks, where a man is sitting behind almost a blockade of computer towers in the corner.

“Huh,” says Manuela. “I know we don’t age, but I imagined him older anyway.”

“You’ve never _met_ him?” hisses Carter. Jan’s still stuck on _we don’t age_.

“I’ve installed a bug on all your phones,” says Yardsley from behind the blockade. “Call it a farewell present. Won’t tell you what it does, though, it’s nice to leave some surprises.”

“They’re turned off,” Carter points out.

“Doesn’t matter. It’ll keep.” He stands, and finally Jan can see him. He’s White, balding, wearing a thick pair of spectacles and a plaid shirt. He looks like every post doc Jan’s ever met. “You here to kill me, then? I’d expect that from Manuela, but I’m not really sure if you boys know what you’re getting into.”

“He’s _exactly_ as annoying as I imagined him,” says Manuela. The lights flicker again and die altogether, leaving only the blinking LEDs in the block of computers. Hang on, are they _moving_? And what is that sound? “Any time you like,” says Manuela. Ah, right.

Jan edges toward where Carter should be and briefly panics when he can’t find him. Then Carter’s hand is on his shoulder—he knows because it’s like his own hand—and he tries to think of a use for the little earthly stars flashing green and red and amber. They’re something big. Something terrifying. Something that could step on Yardsley and squash him without noticing, but he’ll never see anything of them except their flickering eyes.

Jan can hear Yardsley’s breathing quicken, his footsteps scuff backward across a floor that now sounds more like bare dirt than carpet. “A-are you still there,” he says. They none of them make any reply. “I can _see_ you,” he says, but he’s lying. “I’ll find you. I’ll never rest until I find you.”

“You’ll never rest, period,” says Manuela in great satisfaction. Yardsley must not be able to hear her any more, because he doesn’t give any sign as she turns on her heel and brushes past Jan and Carter. “Come on. I feel like going out for dinner.”

Jan makes his way out last, checks to make sure everyone’s outside, and shuts the door. Behind him the lights flicker back to their full brightness, where he supposes they will stay until Yardsley’s electric bill is due. And then they will shut off. He feels a bit weird about trapping someone in a dark nether realm to be endlessly pursued by giant blinking robot things and then going out for margaritas to celebrate, but… he supposes Yardsley did deserve it.

 

For some reason Jan thought Distortion would stop making a nuisance of himself when he was no longer needed to distract Manuela from Yardsley’s creepy surveillance thing. But he doesn’t. If anything he widens his scope, and starts turning up in Jan’s lab, too, holding cell cultures up to the light in his scalpel fingers and dropping them on the floor, ruining _days_ of careful work.

“What’s your problem with me?” he demands. Distortion backs up slightly, still smiling at him. “You’re not even generating _fear_ , here. You’re just making a mess.”

“I suppose it’s become a habit! And it is fun to watch you change colors. I always forget humans can do that.”

“How did Yardsley get you to do his dirty work, anyway?”

“It’s so amusing when targets point each other out.”

“Well, if it’s just amusement you’re after, I’m sure I could work something out, find someone who deserves to be annoyed more than me. Here, what about Gertrude Robinson? She was sort of in league with Yardsley, or at least she yelled at people on the internet for him. Go bother her. And let Manuela know, I’m sure she’ll get a kick out of it.”

 

Manuela is in a shockingly good mood the rest of the week.

At one point Jan catches her returning from outside with a satisfied smile on her face, and when he looks out onto the roof three or four people are piling into Distortion’s yellow door. Good Lord, are there more of them?

He finds out a bit more about this when he’s called into the Magnus Institute to give a second statement—Robinson wants a followup on the first one.

“New office?” he asks as he sits down.

A sour expression passes over her face. “Already two offices have been… rendered unusable. I expect that soon enough this one will be compromised as well.”

“Er… compromised how?”

She sighs and gives him a look over the tops of her glasses as if it’s an intolerably stupid question. “Can we begin?”

“Sure. Sorry.”

“Statement of Jan Kilbride, given 7th December, 2012, regarding his continued transformation.” He looks sharply at her, because she _shouldn’t_ know that, unless one of her assistants snitched. When it becomes clear he’s not going to talk she says, “I believe you will understand what I mean when I say that as head archivist in this _particular_ institution I am granted certain insights. I do not ask for them. Please, begin.”

Oh. She’s one of them. He swallows, and tells his story, leaving nothing out (except the fact that he helped trap her college roommate in a dark nether realm), because she might be able to advise him. He asks, at the end, whether she has any reading materials on how to be an avatar, almost more to be funny than because he thinks she’ll actually show him any. She frowns at him as if she’s confused as to why he’s asking.

“We don’t receive many statements from avatars,” she says slowly. “They tend to be wary of the Institute as a competing power. And I don’t believe many of them share your idea of what it means to be a good avatar.”

“Well… how do you manage it?”

“I am not an avatar of Beholding. I have no physiological need to terrify others.” She regards him for a moment with an uninterpretable expression, and then says, “Good day.”

“O-oh. Um, good day, then?” He stands and goes to the door; when he glances back she’s already reading something else, as if his existence barely registered to her. He shudders. Probably serves her right whatever Manuela and Distortion have done to her offices. If he can remember the way to the one he recorded in last time he can try to look in and see what it was…

He nearly runs right into a door standing open to the middle of the hallway as he’s craning his neck around to look in one of the offices. He flinches back and stares at it. _This_ door shouldn’t be just standing open, right?

A freckly woman peeks around the edge. “Oh, sorry,” she says. “Didn’t see you there.” Another head pokes out about a foot above hers. This one has dyed black hair and heavy eye makeup, and it would be comical to see them stacked one above the other if he didn’t look like he would readily kill Jan to keep him quiet.

“Not going to tell anyone about this, are you?” he says.

Jan can hear Manuela’s muffled voice from somewhere inside the door, saying, “Are we getting out or not?”

“Oh, er, hello,” says Jan. “If you’re looking to do something awful to Robinson’s office, I’d wait. She’s in right now.”

“Cheers,” says the freckly woman. “Should we go back in, or…?”

But the decision is made for her when she’s shoved out into the wall and Manuela rebounds off her. The man shuffles out of the way and a round woman with subtly uncomfortable proportions makes way for Distortion and then gently closes the door behind them.

Her neck is…

“And who’s this?” she asks, not quite looking at Jan.

“Oh, that’s Jan. He’s fine. He’s the one gave Dis… er, Michael the idea to fuck with Robinson.”

“Lovely,” says the woman with the uncomfortable neck. Seeing her standing next to Distortion, there’s something akin about them. “You can help, if you want, Jan. We’re trying something different this time.”

The freckly woman grins and holds up four aerosol cannisters. “Structural foam, baby. It’ll last so much longer than the shaving cream. She’ll have to _saw_ her stuff out. We just have to lie low until she leaves.”

“Or draw her out with a distraction,” points out the tall man. “Risky… if you think she can actually retaliate.”

“She certainly can’t do anything more to me than she already has,” says Distortion. “I’ll go and see about her, then.”

He stalks off up the hallway. Jan looks furtively around to see if anyone’s coming, but the halls are empty so far. “I think I might go and pretend I have nothing to do with this, but I wish you the best of luck. And, er, Manuela, will you take some pictures?” She snorts and smiles lazily at him, and he starts toward the kitchen, in the opposite direction of the chaos that’s about to begin.

To his surprise, along with the expected David, Manuela’s lab tech David is sitting and having tea with Tim and Sasha. “Room for one more?” he asks.

“Course! Our teapot’s big. Here you go.”

Jan sits next to David-from-the-lab, who immediately starts trying to explain how Carter introduced him to the other David, and isn’t that funny that they have the same name, and it’s perfectly reasonable for him to be here right now. “It’s all right, you don’t have to explain anything,” Jan reassures him. “I’m just glad you’re getting out of the lab for a while.”

 

There’s also the matter of being invited to Evan and Naomi’s wedding. Carter is bursting with pride at being made best man, and is bringing, of all people, David as his plus one. The homeless David, not the one who lives in Manuela’s lab, who, Jam supposes, may technically also be homeless, but that’s not the point. The point is Jan has been _encouraged_ to bring someone, and he can’t think who would be appropriate. Well, he can. But he’s nervous about asking Tim, who might be offended that Jan considers this repayment for letting him stay in his house, or who might think Jan is asking him out, or who might refuse.

Finally he bites the bullet while he’s waiting idle for the autoclave to finish. _Do you want to come to a wedding with me? I thought you might have fun._

 _Whose wedding?_ Tim replies almost immediately, as if he, too, is bored of trying to concentrate on work.

 _I assume you don’t know them, Evan Lukas and Naomi Herne._ Then he remembers that Tim _does_ know of the Lukases and adds, _He’s probably the only decent Lukas, I’m not trying to trick you or anything. He helped Carter a lot._

_Yeah sure. Is it white tie or what?_

_It’s sort of a dress up fancy so you can feel cool type of event?_

_Okay, I’m more excited now._

Tim cleans up _very_ nicely. Despite the fact that Jan’s only ever seen him in tee shirts and sleeveless hoodies, he’s managed to find an honest-to-goodness waistcoat. Jan feels a bit underdressed in the sky-blue suit Carter suggested, but he’s perfectly willing to laugh along with Tim at what an odd pair they make. They’re not nearly the oddest-looking people at the wedding, though. Some of Evan and Naomi’s friends must be theater people, because a few are wearing masquerade outfits or outlandish hats. Over the course of the evening Jan watches David, in quick glimpses, gradually accumulating more and more brightly colored accessories to liven up his unbelievably unobtrusive clothing, gifts from the other guests.

Carter must have gotten his outfit from wherever the bride and groom did, because all three are in matching baby blue florals. He stands beaming by them as they say their vows; after the newlyweds kiss, to Jan’s surprise, Naomi kisses Carter on the cheek. And then Evan gives him what Jan is quite sure is a short but enthusiastic French kiss. The guests break into raucous cheering, and Jan can’t help but cheer alongside them. It’s that or be bitter.

It does help that afterward, when the guests are dancing, Carter finds Jan in the cold garden outside, where he’s looking up at the clouds to try and see stars through them. Flushed with happiness and wine, he kisses Jan too. “That was from Evan,” he murmurs, and begins to laugh, tugging a smile out of Jan. “But this one’s _all_ me.”


End file.
